“Just that he goes to the university. Sort of a perpetual student.”

Rayfield turned to Bast. “Better find the boy.”

Bast left. Rayfield rolled up the will and began tapping it in his palm. He turned suddenly, walking toward Henry’s picture until he stood in front of it. Without turning, he asked, “Who’s your father-in-law?”

“Roland Cade.”

Rayfield turned slowly back to me, eyes widening slightly before they dropped to the will. He stared at it in pensive silence, pen held to his lips. Abruptly, he said, “We’d better call him,” and went to the kitchen.

The young patrolman still watched me. Police talked near Lydia. An awed voice said, “Take a man to do like that.”

“Maybe a strong woman,” someone answered.

I went to the window.

The sun had climbed, filtering through the pines in yellow shafts. Beyond the grounds, I knew people were living their same lives, and at the club couples were playing mixed doubles, or drinking. But I couldn’t envision it. When Rayfield returned I was staring at nothing.

“You must be worried about Henry Cantwell,” he said softly from behind. “Would that be like him, being gone?”

His tone seemed strangely kind. But when I played it back I heard a faint, tense undertone. I turned and said in a flat voice, “I wouldn’t know.”

Rayfield watched me for a moment, then looked down at the will again. “Mrs. Cantwell,” he said almost musingly, “what was she like?”

I had no answer.

For me it had never changed from that first engagement party. Mercedes and long Lincolns had eased up the drive as Henry and Lydia greeted each new arrival. Poised and perfectly coiffed, she’d begun as my youthful notion of a great lady, except that I’d watched too long. Guest upon guest, the precise same smile came and went without quite touching her eyes, and her hugs of greeting resembled acts of will. She seemed to play out the party like a role she knew expertly, which stifled her, real only in a quick turn of the head, one sudden worried glance toward Jason. And for seven years after, she kissed my cheek, remembered when we’d last talked and asked how I was, listening closely to my answer with her head slightly tilted—a minuet of courtesy which, when over, left behind nothing but itself. I’d wondered for a while, then just stopped. “She was our friend,” I said now. “It’s hard for me to talk about.”

The older man from the squad car had appeared next to Rayfield. “No sign of forced entry, sir,” he put in.

“Upstairs, too?”

“Yessir.”

Rayfield seemed almost to smile without changing expression. “Mrs. Cantwell,” he said to me. “How’d she get her money?”

“For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant, we’re not talking about some bird that crashed into a picture window. I knew her.”